The Present and the Role of the Theater

In his influential study on the human being as a homo ludens, a ‘playing man,’ Johan Huizinga explores the play-element of culture. He argues that as a “cultural phenomenon”⁶² and “a social construction”⁶³ play is a necessary and primary condition for the generation and functioning of culture. As an integral element of life, play becomes “a necessity both for the individual – as a life function – and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.”⁶⁴ In the playgrounds, i.e. in the imaginary or material sphere in which play takes place, the homo ludens presents closed and self-contained actions, creating “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”⁶⁵

Theater, derived from the Ancient Greek word theatron for ‘a seeing place,’ is indeed one of the places where the play-element of culture is most evident and most integrated into a public cultural and social context. Drawing on the notion of “culture as performance,”⁶⁶ one of the main assertions of the present study is that it is precisely

61 See chapter 7 entitled “Dramaturgy of Time: Re-Lived Gender Memories in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls” for a detailed analysis.

62 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1980): 1.

63 Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture: 4.

64 Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture: 9.

65 Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture: 10.

66 With the so-called ‘performative turn’ in the 1990s, the notion of “culture as text” was replaced by a focus on “culture as performance,” emphasizing the transformative power of cultural

activities and events that cannot be grasped with traditional text models. For further information see Dwight Conquergood, "Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,"

2. Time in Memory – Memory in Time: CollectiveMemory and African-American Identity 32

theater’s “culture function” that reveals how a culturally, socially, and historically shaped understanding and representation of time is involved in the formation of African-American identity. Due to its performative quality theater provides an exemplary site on which to study processes of collective cultural identity formation. As Performance and Cultural Studies have shown, cultural identity is not a static product, but it is created, invented, and renegotiated in an ongoing process of performance grounded in historical and social influences.⁶⁷ In his study on the anthropology of performance Victor Turner points out that

[…] cultural performances are not simple reflectors or expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting “designs for living.” […] Performance reflexivity is a condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most perceptive members acting representatively, turn, bend or reflect back upon themselves, upon the relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public “selves.”⁶⁸

This study argues that these processes of “cultural performance” and “performative reflexivity” also inform the formation of African-American identity based on the cultural constitution and staging of time as it occurs in African-American theater by female playwrights. It is understood that in order to gain a specific social and cultural meaning and significance, time needs to be acted out. Culturally specific structures of time need to be expressed and acknowledged by those they are meant to comprise.

Communication Monographs Vol. 58 (June 1991).

67 cf. the influential studies by scholars such as Victor Turner (Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Pub., 1982);

Clifford Geertz (Clifford James Geertz, Dichte Beschreibung: Beiträge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994); Erving Goffmann (Erving Goffman, Wir alle spielen Theater: Die Selbstdarstellung im Alltag (München: R. Piper & Co., 1969); Stuart Hall (Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage in association with The Open University, 1997); and Erika Fischer-Lichte (Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008).

68 Victor W. Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York, NY: PAJ Pub., 1986): 24.

The cultural performance in theater indeed represents a very interesting possibility for fulfilling this task. The “liminoid”⁶⁹ process of theater as identified by Turner enables the playwrights to “play with the factors of culture”⁷⁰ and, thus, to confirm a culturally shaped perception and interpretation of time that forms the basis for the formation of African-American identity. African-American theater represents a carrier of cultural memory and is, thus, involved in the preservation and transmittance of an ethnically specific perception and interpretation of the past in the present. It articulates and enacts a particular African-American collective memory, thereby helping to shape and emphasize the significance of this specific collective experience of time in the process of cultural identity formation.

Due to the fact that memories always necessarily transport history as parts of what Harald Welzer calls the “conversational unconscious,”⁷¹ the transmission of collective memory on stage is also a transmission of national history, based on the inextricable connection between personal and political perspectives. For the characters on stage their collective memories are situated in a fictional “present past,” interwoven with personal memories and emotions that connect the living with their ancestors. For the audience, however, the plays are to a certain extent also illustrations of a “pure past” that can be deduced from the fictional family histories positioned within real national American history.⁷² The performance of history in the plays partakes in the process of what Aleida Assmann calls “kulturelle Bildung,” i.e. in the formation of a “comprehensive knowledge of identity based on a particular cultural self-understanding.” ⁷³

This representation of a culturally specific re-working of American and African-American history causes effects of exclusion and inclusion for the audience, which is especially evident with regard to the fact that the plays of interest here are all written-to-the-moment in a very literal sense. 20^th-century African-American theater by female

69 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play: 114.

70 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play: 40. Emphasis original.

71 Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung: 16.

72 The terms “present past” and “pure past” are my translations of Reinhard Koselleck’s distinction between “gegenwärtige Vergangenheit” and “reine Vergangenheit,” introduced in his epilogue to Charlotte Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traums. Mit einem Nachwort von Reinhart Koselleck (München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1966): 117.

73 Aleida Assmann, "Kulturelle Bildung," Ringvorlesung "Bildung und Kultur" (Würzburg:

Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, 2009). My translation. In the original: “[…] ein umfassendes Identitätswissen […], das sich auf ein kulturelles Selbstverständnis gründet.“

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playwrights constitutes a ‘Theater of the Present’ based on the principle of contemporaneity, i.e. on the approximation of the plot’s fictional present and the contemporary real present of the plays’ first production.⁷⁴ The dramatic texts include references to and borrowings from contemporary African-American social history, politics, and popular music in dramatic speech, sending out a number of signals that help to make the historical situation of the action on stage more concrete to the audience. The playwrights do not feel obliged to explain these references to contemporary contexts; they rather expect their audiences to be familiar with current events, developments, and discourses, so that they are able to decipher the specific names and dates mentioned in the speech-acts on stage. The plays presuppose a specific background of cultural knowledge, which may not be shared by a non-contemporary audience. As playwright Shange points out: “I have an overwhelming amount of material I could footnote if I wanted to. I could make my work very official and European and say the ‘Del Vikings’ were a group of singers... the ‘Shorrells’ were a group...but why should I. I’m not interested in doing an annotated Shange.”⁷⁵ The dramatic approximation of fictional time and real time creates a closed community of knowledge, a temporary “communitas,”⁷⁶ between the playwright, the characters, and the audience. The plays’ cultural significance in the context of the creation of a distinct African-American cultural identity is thus inextricably linked with recognition of the references’ social, political, and cultural meaning for 20^th-century black America.

Drawing on the major theories of cultural and memory studies outlined above, the present study aims to examine the cultural performance of African-American identity by focusing on the meaning, representation, and enactment of time and memory in 20^th -century African-American theater by female playwrights. Since theater is a social practice and, thus, a primary medium of cultural self-representation, the focus on plays by

74 For a detailed analysis see chapter 10: “Theater of the Present: Writing to the Moment and to the Audience.“

75 Ntozake Shange, "Interview," Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate (New York:

Continuum, 1983): 163. Emphasis original. The “Del Vikings,” also “The Dell-Vikings,” was an American doo-wop musical group who recorded several hits in the 1950s. They were one of the few successful integrated vocal groups at that time. With the “Shorrells” Shange is probably referring to the 1960s all-black quartet “The Shirelles” who represent the first successful female vocal group of the rock-and-roll era. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.

76 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play: 47.

American female playwrights offers an interesting approach to how African-American collective identity is culturally performed via the staging of different temporal structures. Based on the conviction that the plays represent an artistic mediation of history and memory, African-American theater is foregrounded as a constitutive carrier of collective memory that displays a cultural performance of time in support of a particular African-American identity. Because of its performative quality theater is a means of cultural self-definition and self-affirmation in that it represents a possibility for staging an African-American ‘remembered time’ that constitutes a counter-memory to white American history.⁷⁷

The performative quality of theater enables not only an abstract reference to the past, but it allows the embodiment of it on stage through the introduction of African-American characters who represent and rearticulate the significance of memory as the defining force in the cultural constitution of African-American time and identity. The normative canonical memories of an absolute remote past preserved in cultural memory as well as the passing on of collective formative memories about the recent past transported in communicative memory serve to differentiate between a ‘we’ and a ‘they’ and, thus, to create a unique African-American identity in the present. The representation and enactment of cultural and communicative memory and the introduction of the different overlapping temporal structures of the remote past, the recent past, and the present help to stabilize and promote a specific African-American perception of time that forms the basis for the construction of the characters’ African-American identities.

The characters are identified and identify themselves within a continuum of time in which the past informs both the present and the future. Temporal continuity is ensured through a perception of the past as an instructive force whose legacy is preserved in family genealogy. The acceptance of the past’s legacy and the individual characters’

integration into the larger genealogical chain of their families are major preconditions for the individual characters to find their own cultural identities and to cope with the challenges of being black in a white-dominated society. The conscious recollection of the

77 The concept of counter-memory was first introduced by Michel Foucault (Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).

2. Time in Memory – Memory in Time: CollectiveMemory and African-American Identity 36

past and of the ancestors in the actual moment of performance serves to ensure temporal continuity and bridges the gap between what Reinhard Koselleck has termed the

“Erfahrungsraum” and the “Erwartungshorizont,” between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation in modern times.⁷⁸

78 cf. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989): 349-375.

3. Slave Ancestors and Mythic Geography: The